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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

ISIS: the need to understand

THE
AUDACIOUS VENTURE TO UNDERSTAND

Maryam
Sakeenah

A good deal has been said about ISIS being a grotesque
travesty of Islam and a defiant rejection of all that is commonly held to be
moral and humane. Islamic scholars from a variety of denominations have come
forward with a single voice to condemn it as a grave wrong, and this of
course was vital and timely. However, condemnation alone misses a vital point; it
flatly rests on the surface of a much deeper phenomenon.

It is more helpful to engage in an effort to understand-
because when groups like ISIS emerge, we are warned that something about our
collective humanity has gone terribly wrong. When human
beings take up ruthless violence against one another, it shakes our faith in
humanity. And yet the perpetrators and oppressors are not any less human than
the rest of us- so what disfigured our humanity that we became capable of
systematically inflicting pain on others and then celebrating it in the name of ideology?

Phenomena like ISIS are not rare in human history. But to
begin to solve a recurring problem we do not need to just condemn, but to understand.
A serious and honest effort at understanding is essential because when we engage in it we
identify the deep-seated grievances and pent-up feelings of being wronged
without redress that fuel the vicious cycle of reactionary violence.

But understanding becomes difficult when we ‘otherize’ and
then condemn the ‘other’ whom we have created in our morally superior
self-perception. The interconnectedness of a globalized world shows the error
in viewing phenomena in isolation from contexts and other events- contemporary
or historical. So much of what we see happening today can somehow or the other
be traced to events that took place in the recent or not-so-recent past.

It certainly adds a deeper dimension to our understanding to
remind ourselves that ISIS was born in the detention camps of the US in Iraq, and
got recruits from refugee facilities during and shortly after the US invasion. This
gives the context to the radicalization of many of the human beings who now associate
themselves with the group.

Lest we forget, Iraq was invaded in 2003 on an utterly false
pretext of the threat of what was virtually a dysfunctional and
impotent weapons programme. The official strategy of the invasion was ‘Shock
and Awe’, which explicitly called for ‘paralyzing the country... destroying
food production, water supplies and infrastructure’; the strategy involved the
use of chemical weapons- white phosphorus, to name one- in civilian areas which
has so far led to hundreds of thousands of stillbirths and birth defects other
than instant fatalities. 740,000 women are war widows, 4.5 million were
rendered homeless. Hundreds of thousands were made refugees during the brutal
invasion of Fallujah alone that left 70% of the town’s buildings completely
destroyed. Prison abuse and torture by US soldiers in Iraq has been brought to
light, but so much remains still shrouded in history’s oblivion. But while mass
deception may hide this narrative from public perception, it lives and rankles
in the memories and consciousness of the victims and the witnesses. As the African proverb goes, 'The Axe forgets what the Tree remembers.'

When disempowered human beings are subjected to ignominious
occupation and oppression, they will seek redress in militant, often frenzied
ways; they will cling on to ideologies that legitimize and glorify the revenge
which they believe is the vent. The direct experience of torture and killing
desensitizes sensibilities from the use of violence on others, and routinizes
it.

The mistake we make is when we locate the root of the
problem with violent groups in the ideology they associate themselves with. In doing so,
we fail to see the roots that run deeper. Violent ideologies triumph in violent
contexts.

When we condemn such groups and vow to strike back with
force against them, we again miss the point that to stem violence we need to
understand what fuels it- and in most cases, what fuels it is not ideology but the
ignominy of defeat and oppressive occupation. Ideology helps later to corroborate,
legitimize and sanctify. Hence military operations against such organizations
have not yielded stable and enduring peace.

At the terrible risk of being judged as the devil’s
advocate, I dare to understand that it
may at times and in part be the work of our own hands that nurtures extremist
violence . As long as such wrongs continue to be done to human
beings by the powerful, violent groups seeking lost pride will continue to proliferate in
multifarious forms- sometimes as Khmer Rouge, sometimes as ISIS or as the
undiscovered many who may just be in various stages of their genesis that
contemporary global politics fosters.